Cessna 340 - Modified for Short & Soft Field Takeoff & Landings

hi I'm Doug Jackson is mrs. my 1974 Cessna 340 with the rubber suits Tokyo over 1300 cessna 340s were built from 1971 until production ended in 1984 when they first rolled off the assembly plant you can pick one up for just around two hundred thousand dollars today they range in price from a hundred and forty thousand dollars all the way up to half a million Doug is completely refurbished this airplane including paint interior and this amazing panel [Music] [Applause] [Music] another unique feature to this aircraft is the robertson stol kit which replaces the split flaps with fowler flaps which greatly increases the takeoff performance for the airplane [Music] so let's talk to Doug and learn more about his unique aircraft I got rid of my b-36 TC a few years ago guy just come along out of the blue want to buy it and my wife said well let's upgrade to something that we can travel in that'd be a little bit have more useful load a little bit more weather capabilities and I'd always wanted a pressurized twin but I didn't think there was anything that would operate off this 2300 foot grass runway so I got on Beach talk aviation form and I got to ask him some guys about you know what the what the choices were and someone mentioned a 340 with an R Stoke kid on it robertson stol kid on it and I'd of course never heard of it and there's very very rare we know of about six or seven of these that are flying I contacted a guy up in Washington State Skagit Washington up there and he's got one of these got to tell me about it he said basically you can go anywhere that a 182 can go if you keep him light my light I mean you know four or five hundred pounds on her gross and and he was right I went in he actually gave me my initial training in this in his airplane was just like this one and I was just blown away taking off six seven hundred feet landing in a thousand feet we spent three days up there flying flying up the San Juan Islands and just had a blast him come back found this one it was a basket case guy had just kind of treated like a little truck and but it was there wasn't one mini to choose from so over a period of a year we painted it put interior avionics in it engines were good shape didn't eating anything but some accessories and I've had it now flying for about three years I've got about almost $500 in it it's been to BA Hawk Down Mexico Baja twice deep down in Mexico Bahamas everywhere of course I use it a lot in my operation airdrop our charity so so this is a straight 340 there was a 340 and 340 a this is a 340 1974 model this one's been highly modified it's got the Rams six engines which 335 horse the side factory and plane came out with 310 horse oh five 20s these were 335 this one's got the art robertson stol kit which is a modified Fowler flaps instead of the split flaps and it also has the VG's and the combination all that raises the gross weight about four hundred pounds and then of course lowers the VMC install drastically I think somewhere 1215 mile knots so drastic change from the straight 340 if you're doing short field the take-off if you do the true robertson stol takeoff that's full flap takeoff 30 degrees I don't do that very very often it's you're right on the ragged edge of BMC but you are limited to all takeoffs and landings have to have a minimum of 10 degrees flaps in this airplane to reach the STC numbers so every takeoff is at 10 degrees flaps I usually rotate about 72 to 74 knots liftoff just shy of 80 and then coming in on the landing same thing you come over the fence about 75 80 knots I've got an angle attack indicator in this airplane and so I watched that more than anything for a known approach it kind of takes all the guesswork out of it well this field here is 2300 and then it's it's not even a challenge you know you could go shorter but I wouldn't go in much shorter than this because the problem is if you were to lose an engine on takeoff you're very marginal this er this airplane book numbers say that you're accelerate stop distance and this things about 1,900 feet it's probably a little bit optimistic but it's close to that this airplane likes a minimum of 16,000 up to about 20 21,000 feet does really well if you fly it by the book numbers round numbers you're gonna be burning close to 40 gallons an hour I fly this plane lean a peak booster manifold pressure book number is 23 inches of manifold pressure and 2,300 rpm that's about 38 39 gallons an hour I fly this airplane Lena peak at about 33 and a half inches a manifold pressure 2,300 rpm and I'm only burning about 29 or 30 30 gallons and then a winter time about 29 in the summer increases the range drastically gives me another 250 not 250 nautical mile range and the rate of the speed you can flat plan it at those prior cities you can fly playing 190 knots and it has an honest thousand nautical miles of range interesting numbers on this airplane is 800 is the magic number you can take 800 pounds 800 miles you can take 600 pounds a thousand miles or you can take a thousand pounds 600 miles so it just balances only at that at the 800 number personal use now since I sold my business I used a lot in operation airdrop as I said and in flying cancer patients I fly for a local charity here called Raquel's wings for flight and we take cancer patients down to Houston to MD Anderson for treatment so operation airdrop is a organization manson friends founded about a year ago a year and a half ago during the Hurricanes down on the coast and it grew out of a little grassroots 10-15 pilots up to now we have about 900 pilots on our registry and one of the largest general aviation disaster relief charities and oil so the way Operation airdrop works is it's very simple we're basically dispatchers we locate and and acquire donated supplies whether it might be diapers water food toiletries whatever's needed medications and we dispatched the pilots through a website and Facebook page and we'll give them a pickup point a rally point like in Florida we use Gainesville Florida they're in the Hurricanes up in North Carolina we were based in Raleigh and volunteers come in we might have as many as 150 people work in the ground and they will catalog and and away all the items the pilots come in and we'll give them a destination to go to and we we always coordinate with the receiving end ask them what they need and when they want it and we coordinate with them very closely and then our team goes in and catalogs all the items are our command team which is mostly composed of some of our board directors they make sure that the after loaded correctly and the pilots have all know exactly what they're gonna be hauling how much weight and they give us a form or we haven't if we give them a form to fill out and so we know what they can't take we are good for about the first five days we're kind of rapid strike FEMA and and the other organizations they take a little bit longer to spool up and we can be gone and we can literally dispatch in a matter of a few hours and you know if they call us today we can be on site tomorrow delivering supplies typically during a hurricane roads will be down there'll be a lot of course flooding power lines whatever and generally the the general aviation Airport is always open if it's not open the first day to be open the second or third day and so we can get in there into a spot where no one else can get to with trucks and get people supplies they need to get through the first three to five days and that's you know when when the trucks can roll they're not needed anymore so if anyone wants to to help they can of course we can we always need money we're like any other organization that takes a lot of cash to run this thing they can go to our Facebook page or our website operation airdrop it's website is operation - airdrop comm and then the Facebook page is just operation airdrop you can donate if your pilot we want to help sign up to fly for us it's a very simple very simple form then we always need ground ground volunteers well I do want to mention that Raquel swings for flight up in Decatur because that's a that's something you're near and dear to my heart because I've lost a lot of friends to cancer and it was founded by Fabiola brada which owns the FBO in Decatur his mother died of breast cancer a few years ago and he founded Raquel hurt that was her name Raquel we fly as I said we fly patients down to MD Anderson for treatment then it's very tough for them to get down there in a car especially after they have a treatment just to ride home is brutal for them and we can have them there an hour and a half and we shut them from that from millionaires FBO that we use at hobby and they loan us very generous wellness a car and we take the patient drop them right off at the door then pick them up after their treatment Raquel swings for flight has a website and a Facebook page and as with any of the charity donations are much appreciated so on a340 some of them are no nice the straight through 40 is not and the only difference between no nice and not is the inboard or the main differences the inboard boots I don't have those but I do have the hot plate on the on the windshield it's got the heated props and of course the boots on the tail both vertical and horizontal on the tail pneumatic boots are pretty simple you have air coming off of the off of the vacuum pump or in this case it's a pressure pump and there's channels in here as you as you build up by so here you allow it to get at least they say about a half an inch of ice I mean you flip the switch in there and it blows this boot up there's these channels will will inflate pops the ice off the leading edge and of course on the on the prop it's just heat it and you leave that known anytime you're below about 30 it's getting pretty popular now on even some of the single-engine airplanes just have bee gees or vortex generators and what these do is is if you know anything about the lift in aerodynamics is when you have a stall the angle at attack gets it at a certain point and the air is not no longer attached what's like all the boundary layer it's no longer attached to the wing and that air will will break and start rotating over the top of the wing when it does that you lose your lift so what this does is it creates little vortices on the wing it keeps that boundary layer attached at a higher angle of attack and that lowers the stall speed in this particular airplane about 15 knots which is drastically our approach speed drops from 1995 down into the low mid 70s everyone thinks of these tip tanks is being Oxton but actually they're in reality they're the main take they hold 50 gallons and you've got in this particular airplane thirty one and a half gallons in the ox tank which is the wing tank and then I happen to have another 18 and a half in a locker tank so if you add all those up that's a hundred gallons per side for total of 200 usable what makes this plane unique and if you ever walk up to a twin Cessna just show somebody impress someone this if you see this that's a Robertson stove maude and what that does is they remove the split flaps which would simply just hinge down and they add this this flap system here which gives it a Fowler flap your first 10 degrees of you have two settings ten and thirty degrees you ten degrees come straight out it's about right here and down slightly and that's all lift hardly no drag then from ten to thirty for landing is this last three inches of travel right here and that simply that comes out just a little bit further and down and that's where you get all your drag and that's what gives you the really low VMC numbers with the interview complete it was time to pull the airplane out and go fly [Music] we're good tramps set one two three pressurization set and we're just waiting on all to warm up I think I know you mean yeah this thing was pretty rough you didn't mean this pretty much everything in here has been replaced huh yeah I mean yeah cause you know mechanically it was fine it was just cosmetically he just treated like an old pickup flatbush traffic plus us the 502 hotel Papa's back tax in three five so how does this thing handle the soft fields just fine yeah we're about today we're about 5,600 pound fifties right at 58 under pal so we're about to 600 under gross gross to 6400 so yeah it a quick run up here this is pretty good it gives you a left bag out oh nice right bag off yeah but but the modern you know engine monitors and everything is so much nicer for the engines yeah I mean you can really lean them out and make it run well and then you last longer you tell if you have a problem come see a tram come yeah he got my with this if you got one cylinder that's consistently hotter you know I mean either got to work on spackling or maybe that cylinders good yeah yeah I've got one problem number two over there just seems to always run more we worked on baffling everything you just can't see that in it all right so we're good to go so we're gonna do is accelerate up to about 75 knots will lift off obvious if we lose one before that you know we're gonna have to just hit the trees and take what we get as soon as I get my hand off the gear lever we're committed to flying at that point so here we go already [Music] airspeeds of love [Music] it should look good our 60 knots 70 knots sepi club knots their ship la Europe there you go Wow look I wanna do public your liver that's pretty cool pull your line flaps coming up and you get your synthetic vision on there and everything yeah that's nice I mean with the amount of information you have here's now it's just amazing yeah [Music] Harold after a yellow cup 102 father Juliet left I went three five remember hopeful our stands place to see what we can see is his own private stripper okay we should see his it's right down here is it a crass trip huh yeah it's a grassroot last real people had some guys coming excavate the thing and read it right yeah [Music] caution terrain you're never going to turn her off or she'll be bitching at us the whole time that thing's 2,300 feet long 2300 yes what do you say look short doesn't it yeah I'll just make a pass now we buy my land but I totally my class so if you had to use this heated windshield before uh yeah yeah I've got spots in this thing it happens I really well there'll be other said you father Juliet let's watch like three five so being down this low 18 gallons acai 18 yeah so yeah and I haven't even now that's not I haven't even really cleaned idiots yeah that's that's not bad well we're 21 inches of my Brazilian you see that angle the tacit Decatur a brittle star well it's working right now we're just not pulling oh yeah you can see his little power line things there yeah that's gotta be the hard part is getting over that drop it yeah yeah it would be people really nice to read hangar over there yeah yeah [Music] that's fun you do some fun flying you and your Badlands traveler and all that stuff yeah yeah I mean there's this lot of room in here you can see how this be a nice long cross-country airplane yeah you know there's not a I mean just the filter room it's you know difference in this thing in a 414 414 the arbiter for portaits anyway have exactly the same engines exactly the same playing and fuel system they're just about four or five inches wider and a couple of feet longer that's why this thing's a place this thing significantly faster therefore for ten but for four teens a lot more traveling you know better travel an airplane obviously and then of course you get it for 21 now so a different animal after so that's a kind of a low power extended cruise sitting right there about 20 more powerless for traffic everyone for tell you about 28 inches 20:38 bridge board [Music] I don't know if you know much about Lena peak yeah somewhere so Ford working so we're on a more on the lean side of peak right there right now earning about twelve and a half counts inside there down [Music] just happy as a clam dreamers feed 140 knots there 140 yeah we're we're only true airspace only 140 right there but we're you know we're so low and pull way back yeah but we go up to about 16,000 this thing really comes alive you'd be 100 indicating 140 or so you three are speaking 190 yeah get your XM weather and all that stuff it's XM weather or two it does not now that's just that's just a little cheap that's not perfectly mounting those can't probably found a car deal with so that's just in here velcro Deanna I've got a DSP weather weather traffic this thing's pre-wired for a garment radar but I'd never put it in is there 20,000 bucks nine seven record traffic it'd be nice yeah that's the thing if you were using this commercially like flying somewhere okay but if you're just going for you know you just okay if the weather is that bad you might use radar wait yeah I mean go somewhere else yeah this these airplanes as good as they are they're still a piston engine airplane and fly this thing in a real severe weather is just not the smartest thing so you're first notch the flaps on this is 168 knots indicated and when you put it up the plane balloons like crazy so it's a lot of lift your and I think it's like 15 or 18 percent of the wing area yeah then that last notch it really it's all drag three five in belly so I know if you see yep there's the runway right now they're the house oh yeah okay it's hard to see ya so who maintains a runway and mowing it and all that we have we hire a guy that does it we have dudes you know page from later and they're real reasonable news yeah damn that would look very long from up here no and we've had any of you twos in here before have you yeah I guess it looks about the same length another one they're supposed to be exactly like that with arrow country brands who not to Papa Mike is three miles west of the air fief that the airport will be crossing over midfield or let them win four three six like Dallas arrow that's a yellow car one or two Papa Julie our little frog point three five [Music] it's fun to cut my hair on the badlands traveler flop down the river looking for hogs yeah I imagine so haven't seen these things that's Turkey and yeah beards no offense I know they're out here though well it's getting pretty bad here from what her alright last notch flaps leprous traffic wants us to 500 - ohh - Papa's left downwind three five okay look I've watched you Father Juliet left downwind three five it's Betty they're at angle tank indicators pretty neat so we're just coming and you see the donut yeah we're looking for a full blue no no [Music] I'll get that here pretty shortly betting flow [Music] gasps Oh full stack of cash down fixture prop [Music] [Music] so for every Comanche for one thoughts without where's my place Wow nice what made that look easy I figure it up here well back I think I've got close to about a thousand landings in turnout Oh in this Airport yeah Wow it's a man that's great job that's a pretty excellent short-field airplane man you mean I never used a brakes we just kind of toast it too yeah pretty nice if long as we're both running it's a great short fielder yeah yeah well doc thanks sir yeah good pleasure yeah I could fly with you again yeah that was pretty unique I think being able to a short field to a soft field short field on a twin Cessna like this yeah it's a little bit different thanks sir all right well good well thanks again for watching another episode of flying doodles if you can please please click that like and subscribe button that really helps us out in the ratings and helps you to promote us a little better which helps us grow which hopefully we can eventually you know make a living doing this but it's pretty unique being able to do this thank you guys for making it happen and it's pretty awesome airplane right here I'm pretty pretty unique so like and subscribe and if you really feel like it it's patreon.com/scishow there's a dollar a month you can be a patron of the channel thank you [Music]

Channel: Flying Doodles

Views: 452,109

Rating: 4.9620852 out of 5

Keywords: cessna, cessna 340, cessna 340a, twin cessna, 340, twin piston, cessna aircraft, flying doodles, avgeek, c170, landing an airplane, cessna 172, steveo1kinevo, taking off, flying cowboys, mzeroa, vlog, flightchops, pilot life, flight vlog, aviation, stol, soft field landing, soft field takeoff, short field landing, short field takeoff, short field, cabin class

Id: 76rpSJAQnIM

Length: 27min 11sec (1631 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 26 2019